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The Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), is a
comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Two fully-bound print
editions of the OED have been published under its current
name, in 1928 and 1989; as of December 2008 the dictionary's
current editors had completed a quarter of the third edition.

Entries and relative size

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120
years to type the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60
years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes
to store it electronically. As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford
English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main
entries. Supplementing the entry headwords,
there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000
italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in
total, including 137,000 pronunciations; 249,300 etymologies; 577,000 cross-references; and
2,412,400 usage quotations. The
dictionary's latest, complete print edition (Second Edition, 1989)
was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730
pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set,
which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. As entries
began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the
longest entry became make in 2000, then put in
2007.

The OED's official policy is to attempt to record a word's
most-known usages and variants in all varieties of English
past and present, worldwide. Per the 1933 "Preface":

It continues:

The OED is the focus of much scholarly work about English
words. Its headword variant spellings
order list influences written English in English-speaking
countries.

History

Origins

At first, the dictionary was unconnected to Oxford University but
was the idea of a small group of intellectuals in London; it
originally was a Philological
Society project conceived in London by Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall, who were
dissatisfied with the current English dictionaries. In June 1857,
they formed an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for
unlisted and undefined words lacking in current dictionaries. In
November, Trench's report was not a list of unregistered words;
instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English
Dictionaries, which identified seven distinct shortcomings in
contemporary dictionaries:

The Philological Society, however, ultimately realized that the
number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words
in the English dictionaries of the 19th century. The Society
eventually shifted their idea from only words that were not already
in English dictionaries to a more comprehensive project. Trench
suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was
needed. On January 7, 1858, the Society formally adopted the idea
of a comprehensive new dictionary. Volunteer readers would
be assigned books and copy to quotation slips passages
illustrating actual word usages, then post them to the dictionary
editor. In 1858, the Society agreed to the project in principle,
with the title "A New English Dictionary on Historical
Principles" (NED).

Early editors

Richard Chenevix Trench played the key role in the project's first
months, but his ecclesiastical career
meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time
required, easily ten years ; he withdrew, and Herbert Coleridge
became the first editor.

On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published, and
research started. His house was the first editorial office. He
arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54-pigeon-hole grid. In April
1861, the group published the first sample pages; later that month,
the thirty-one-year old Coleridge died of tuberculosis.

Furnivall then became editor; he was enthusiastic and
knowledgeable, yet temperamentally ill-suited for the work. Many
volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project as
Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the
slips had been misplaced.

Recruited assistants handled two tons of quotation slips
and other materials. Furnivall understood the need for an efficient
excerpting system, and instituted several prefatory projects. In
1864, he founded the Early English Text Society, and in 1868, he
founded the Chaucer Society for preparing general benefit editions
of immediate value to the dictionary project. The compilation
lasted 21 years.

In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both
Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached
James Murray, who
accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and
Murray met with several publishers about publishing the dictionary.
In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with
the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following
year. The dictionary project finally had a publisher 20 years after
the idea was conceived. It would be another 50 years before the
entire dictionary was complete.

Despite the participation of some 800 volunteer readers, the
technology of paper-and-ink was the major drawback regarding the
arbitrary choices of relatively untrained volunteers about "what to
read and select" and "what to discard."

Late during his editorship of the dictionary Murray learned that a
prolific contributor to it, W.C.Minor, was in fact an inmate of the
Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally
Insane. Minor was a Yale University trained surgeon
and military officer in the U.S. Civil War who had been sent to the
asylum after murdering a man in London. The stories of Murray and
Minor became the main subjects of a bestselling book written by
Simon Winchester, published in the
United States as The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of
Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English
Dictionary and in other countries as The Surgeon of Crowthorne: a tale
of murder, madness and the love of words.

Oxford editors

During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the
process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope.
Although they had pages printed by publishers, no publication
agreement was reached; both the Cambridge University Press and
the Oxford University Press were approached. Finally, in 1879,
after two years' negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray, the
OUP agreed to publish the dictionary and to pay the editor, Murray,
who was also the Philological Society president. The dictionary was
to be published as interval fascicles, with
the final form in four 6,400-page volumes. They hoped to finish the
project in ten years.

Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron outbuilding, the "Scriptorium", which was lined with wooden
planks, book shelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation
slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of
quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare,
interesting words rather than common usages: for instance, there
were ten times more quotations for abusion than for
abuse. He appealed for readers in newspapers distributed
to bookshops and libraries; readers were specifically asked to
report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for
words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or
used in a peculiar way." Murray had American philologist and
liberal-arts-college professor
Francis March manage the collection in
North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the
Scriptorium, and by 1882, there were 3,500,000.

The first Dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February
1884—-twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full
title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles;
Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological
Society; the 352-page volume, words from A to
Ant, cost 12s.6d or U.S.$3.25. The total sales were a disappointing
4,000 copies.

The OUP saw it would take too long to complete the work with
unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were
hired and two new demands were made on Murray. The first was that he
move from Mill
Hill to Oxford; he did, in
1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected on his new
property.

Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet
schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel
to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the
alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling he would
accelerate his work pace with experience. That turned out not to
be so, and Philip Gell of the OUP forced the promotion of Murray's
assistant Henry Bradley (hired by
Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London, beginning in 1888. In 1896,
Bradley moved to Oxford University. Famously, Dr. W.C.Minor was a prolific contributor as a
reader for Murray. Whilst imprisoned in a criminal lunatic asylum,
he invented his own quotation-tracking system, so that he could
then submit his slips upon the editors' request.

Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business
concerns—containing costs and speedy production—to the point where
the project's collapse seemed likely. Newspapers reported the
harassment, and public opinion backed the editors. Gell was fired,
and the University reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt
that the Dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an
important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish.
Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915,
having been responsible for words starting with
A-D, H-K, O-P
and T, nearly half the finished dictionary;
Bradley died in 1923, having completed E-G,
L-M, S-Sh, St
and W-We. By then two additional editors had been
promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing
without much trouble. William
Craigie, starting in 1901, was responsible for
N, Q-R, Si-Sq,
U-V and Wo-Wy. Whereas previously
the OUP had thought London too far from Oxford, after 1925 Craigie
worked on the dictionary in Chicago, where he
was a professor. The fourth editor was C.T.Onions, who, starting in 1914,
compiled the remaining ranges, Su-Sz,
Wh-Wo and X-Z. It was around this
time that J.R.R.Tolkien was employed by the OED,
researching etymologies of the Waggle to
Warlock range ; he parodied the principal editors
as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story Farmer Giles of Ham. Julian Barnes also was an employee; he was
said to dislike the work.

Fascicles

By early 1894 a total of 11 fascicles had
been published, or about one per year: four for
A-B, five for C, and two for
E. Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the
last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break
(which would eventually become a volume break). At this point it
was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent
instalments: once every three months, beginning in 1895, there
would now be a fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s.6d. or $1 U.S. If
enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published
together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each
time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was
also published in the original larger fascicles.

Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) was first used. It then appeared only on the
outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the
official one and was used everywhere else. The 125th and last
fascicle, covering words from Wise to the end of
W, was published on 19 April 1928, and the full
Dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately.

The early modern English prose of Sir Thomas Browne is probably the most frequently
quoted source of neologisms in the
completed dictionary. William
Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is the
most-quoted woman writer. Collectively, the Bible is the most-quoted work (but in many different
translations); the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi.

Oxford English Dictionary and First Supplement

Between 1928 and 1933 enough additional material had been compiled
to make a one volume supplement so the dictionary was reissued as
the set of 12 volumes and a one-volume supplement in 1933.

Second Supplement and Second Edition

In 1933
Oxford
University had finally put the Dictionary to rest; all work
ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However,
the English language continued to change, and by the time 20 years
had passed, the Dictionary was outdated.

There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would
have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new
supplement of perhaps one or two volumes; but then anyone looking
for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in
three different places. The most convenient choice for the user
would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and
retypeset, with each change included in
its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most
expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced.
The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with
the existing supplement to form a larger replacement
supplement.

Robert Burchfield was hired in
1957 to edit the second supplement; Onions, who turned 84 that year, was
still able to make some contributions as well. Burchfield
emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language, and through the
supplement the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new
words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well
as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield also broadened
the scope to include developments of the language in English-speaking regions beyond the
United Kingdom, including North America, Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. The work
was expected to take seven to ten years. It actually took 29 years,
by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four
volumes, starting with A, H,
O and Sea. They were published in
1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete
dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first
supplement.

By this time it was clear that the full text of the Dictionary
would now need to be computerized. Achieving this would require
retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for
computer searching — as well as for whatever new editions of the
dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the
supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this
process began in 1983, and editorial work started the following
year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with
John A.Simpson and Edmund S.C.Weiner as co-editors.

]And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED)
project began. More than 120 keyboarders of International
Computaprint Corporation in Tampa, Florida, and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, USA, started keying in over 350,000,000
characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in
England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the
information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be
retained, which was done by marking up the content in
SGML. A specialized search engine and display software
were also needed to access it. Under a 1985 agreement, some of this software
work was done at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford
English Dictionary, led by Frank
Tompa and Gaston Gonnet; this
search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation. Computer
hardware, database and other software, development managers, and
programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary
of IBM; the colour syntax-directed editor for
the project, LEXX, was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of
Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton
Litz, an English professor at Princeton University who served on
the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in
Time as saying "I've never
been associated with a project, I've never even heard of a project,
that was so incredibly complicated and that met every
deadline."Paul Gray, "A Scholarly Everest Gets Bigger,"Time,
March 27, 1989.

By 1989 the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the
editors, working online, had successfully combined the original
text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer
material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was
again dropped from the name, and the Second Edition of the
OED, or the OED2, was published. The first
edition retronymically became the
OED1.

The OED2 was printed in 20 volumes. For the first time,
there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they
were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with
A, B.B.C., Cham,
Creel, Dvandva,
Follow, Hat,
Interval, Look,
Moul, Ow, Poise,
Quemadero, Rob,
Ser, Soot, Su,
Thru, Unemancipated, and
Wave.

Although the content of the OED2 is mostly just a
reorganization of the earlier corpus, the retypesetting provided an
opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of
each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily
see those words that actually require a capital letter. Also,
whereas Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation,
there being no standard available at the time, the OED2
adopted the modern International Phonetic
Alphabet. Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets
except Greek were transliterated.

When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989,
the response was enthusiastic. The author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest
publishing event of the century," as quoted by Dan Fisher of the
Los Angeles Times (25 March 1989). TIME dubbed
the book "a scholarly Everest," and Richard Boston, writing for the London
Guardian (24 March 1989), called it "one of the wonders of
the world."

New material was published in the Oxford English Dictionary
Additions Series, which consisted of two small volumes in
1993, and a third in 1997, bringing the dictionary to a total of 23
volumes. Each of the supplements added about 3,000 new definitions.
However, no more Additions volumes are planned, and it is not
expected that any part of the Third Edition, or
OED3, will be printed in fascicles.

Compact editions

In 1971, the 13-volume OED1 (1933) was reprinted as a two-volume,
Compact Edition, done by photographically reducing each
page to one-half its linear dimensions; each compact edition page
held four OED1 pages in a four-up ("4-up") format. The two volume
letters were A and P; the
Supplement was at the second volume's end.

The Compact Edition included, in a small slip-case drawer, a
magnifying glass to help in reading
reduced type. Many copies were inexpensively distributed through
book clubs. In 1987, the second
Supplement was published as a third volume to the Compact Edition.
In 1991, for the OED2, the compact edition format was re-sized to
one-third of original linear dimensions, a nine-up ("9-up") format
requiring greater magnification, but allowing publication of a
single-volume dictionary. It was accompanied by a magnifying glass
as before and A User's Guide to the "Oxford English
Dictionary", by Donna Lee Berg. After these volumes were
published, though, book club offers commonly continued to sell the
two-volume 1971 Compact Edition.

Electronic versions

Screenshot of the second CD-ROM
edition of the OED

Once the text of the dictionary was digitized and online, it was
also available to be published on CD-ROM. The
text of the First Edition was made available in 1988. Afterward,
three versions of the second edition were issued. Version 1 (1992)
was identical in content to the printed Second Edition, and the CD
itself was not copy-protected. Version 2 (1999) had some additions
to the corpus, and updated software with improved searching
features, but it had clumsy copy-protection that made it difficult
to use and would even cause the program to deny use to OUP staff in
the midst of demonstrating the product . Version 3 was released in
2002 with additional words and software improvements, though its
copy-protection remained as unforgiving as that of the earlier
version.

The current and only edition of the OED on CD available for
purchase from Oxford University Press, Version 3.1.1 (2007),
includes a return to the less restrictive nature of Version 1, with
support for hard disk installation, so that the user does not have
to insert the CD to use the dictionary. It has been reported that
this version will work on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, using emulation programs.

Version 4.0 of the CD, scheduled to be available June 2009, will
work with Windows 7 and Mac OS X. This version will use the CD
drive for installation, running only from the hard drive.

On 14 March 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary
Online (OED Online) became available to
subscribers. The online database contains the entire OED2
and is updated quarterly with revisions that will be included in
the OED3 (see below). The online edition is the most
up-to-date version of the dictionary available.

Whilst the OED web site is not optimised for mobile devices, they
have stated that there are plans to provide an API which would
enable developers to develop different interfaces for querying the
OED.

As the price for an individual to use this edition, even after a
reduction in 2004, is £195 or $295 US every year, most subscribers
are large organizations such as universities. Some of them do not
use the Oxford English Dictionary Online portal and have legally
downloaded the entire database into their organization's computers.
Some public libraries and companies have subscribed as well,
including, in March and April 2006, most public libraries in
England and Wales and New Zealand; any person belonging to a
library subscribing to the service is able to use the service from
their own home.

Another method of payment was also introduced in 2004, offering
residents of North or South America the opportunity to pay $29.95
US a month to access the online site.

Third Edition

The planned Third Edition, or OED3, is intended as
a nearly complete overhaul of the work. Each word is being examined
and revised to improve the accuracy of the definitions,
derivations, pronunciations, and historical quotations—a task
requiring the efforts of a staff consisting of more than 300
scholars, researchers, readers, and consultants, and projected to
cost about $55 million. The result is expected to double the
overall length of the text. The style of the dictionary will also
change slightly. The original text was more literary, in that most
of the quotations were taken from novels, plays, and other literary
sources. The new edition, however, will reference all manner of
printed resources, such as cookbooks, wills, technical manuals,
specialist journals, and rock lyrics. The pace of inclusion of new
words has been increased to the rate of about 4,000 a year. The
estimated date of completion is 2037.

New content can be viewed through the OED Online or on the
periodically updated CD-ROM edition.

As of 1993, John Simpson is the Chief Editor. Since the first work
by each editor tends to require more revision than his later, more
polished work, (work on the first edition was, of course, begun at
A) it was decided to balance out this effect, by
performing the early, and perhaps itself less polished, work of the
current revision at a letter other than A.
Accordingly, the main work of the OED3 has been proceeding
in sequence from the letter M. When the OED Online
was launched in March 2000, it included the first batch of revised
entries (officially described as draft entries), stretching from
M to mahurat, and successive
sections of text have since been released on a quarterly basis; by
June 2009, the revised section had reached
recyclist. As new work is done on words in other
parts of the alphabet, this is also included in each quarterly
release. In March 2008, the editors announced that they would
alternate each quarter between moving forward in the alphabet as
before and updating "key English words from across the alphabet,
along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster
surrounding them."

The production of the new edition takes full advantage of
computers, particularly since the June 2005 inauguration of the
whimsically named "Perfect All-Singing All-DancingEditorial and NotationApplication", or "Pasadena." With this
XML-based system, the attention of
lexicographers can be directed more to matters of content than to
presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. The new
system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and
enabled staff in New York to work directly on the Dictionary in the
same way as their Oxford-based counterparts.

Other important computer uses include internet searches for
evidence of current usage, and e-mail submissions of quotations by
readers and the general public.

Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the
general public for help in providing citations for 50 selected
recent words, and produced antedatings
for many. The results were reported in a BBC TV series,
Balderdash and
Piffle. The OED’s small army of devoted readers
continue to contribute quotations; the department currently
receives about 200,000 a year.

Spelling

The OED lists British headword spellings (e.g. labour,
centre) with variants following (labor,
center, etc.). For the suffix more commonly spelt
-ise in British English, OUP policy
dictates a preference for the spelling -ize, e.g.
realize vs realise and globalization vs
globalisation. The rationale is partly linguistic, that
the English suffix mainly derives from the Greek suffix
-ιζειν, (-izo), or the Latin -izāre;
however, -ze is also an Americanism in the fact that the
-ze suffix has crept into words where it did not
originally belong, as with analyse (British English),
which is spelt analyze in American English. See also
-ise/-ize at American
and British English spelling differences.

Criticisms

Despite its claim of authority on the English language, the
Oxford English Dictionary has been criticized from various
angles. Indeed, it has become a target precisely because
of its massiveness, its claims to authority, and, above all, its
influence. In his review of the 1982 supplement, University of
Oxford linguist Roy Harris
writes that criticizing the OED is extremely difficult
because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a
national institution", one that "has become, like the English
monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle". Harris
also criticises what he sees as the "black-and-white lexicography"
of the Dictionary, by which he means its reliance upon
printed language over spoken—and then only privileged forms of
printing. He further notes that, while neologisms from respected
"literary" authors such as Samuel
Beckett and Virginia Woolf are
included, usage of words in newspapers or other, less
"respectable", sources hold less sway, although they may be
commonly used.

In contrast, Tim Bray, co-creator of
Extensible Markup Language (XML), credits the
OED as the developing inspiration of that markup language. Similarly, the author
Anu Garg, founder of Wordsmith.org, has
called the Oxford English Dictionary a "lex icon."

Further reading

Caught in the Web of Words: J.A.H.Murray
and the Oxford English Dictionary, by K. M. Elisabeth
Murray, Oxford University Press and Yale University Press, 1977;
new edition 2001, Yale University
Press, trade paperback, ISBN 0-300-08919-8.

Empire of Words: The Reign of the
Oxford English Dictionary, by John Willinsky, Princeton
University Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 0-691-03719-1.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford
English Dictionary, Simon
Winchester, Oxford University Press, 2003, hardcover, ISBN
0-19-860702-4.

(UK title) The Surgeon of Crowthorne /
(US title) The Professor and the Madman:
A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford
English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester; see
The Surgeon of
Crowthorne for full details of the various editions.

Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford
English Dictionary, by Lynda Mugglestone, Yale
University Press, 2005, hardcover, ISBN 0-300-10699-8.

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English
Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and
Edmund Weiner, Oxford University Press, 2006, hardcover, ISBN
0-19-861069-6.

Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED,
Charlotte Brewer, Yale University Press, 2007, hardcover, ISBN
978-0-300-12429-3.